How can the age-old notion of beauty regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century? Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.

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This edition of Blowup will be a "Book Sprint." From June 17 to June 21 we invite a group of leading thinkers, writers and artists to an intensive four day writing session, in which they will start and finish writing a book together. Daily updates ...

We have lowered the price on some of our V2_books! The older books in the Interdisciplinary-series are now just 10 euro's. The Dutch and English version of 'Dick Raaymakers A Monograph' have also been lowered in price. They are now 35 euro. Order ...